It’s a familiar story among healthcare businesses of all types:

Boatloads of money are spent updating an “outdated” company website. Design is tweaked or changed altogether and copy is rewritten to encourage more people to inquire about purchases.

But months after the new website launch, the sales team isn’t receiving any more inquiries via the website than they were before.  The marketing team is frustrated because a significant chunk of their budget was eaten up with the redesign, and now they can’t run more ads to get more leads to the sales team.

So what went wrong?

Well, there are 3 areas that your new designed probably failed to address.

1. The Customer

A lot of times, companies who undergo website redesign projects forget that their website is primarily for their potential customers’ use, not their own. 

When this happens, a redesign project is taken on without regard for how the customer wants to use the site, what they want to know when they visit the site, and how to make their purchase experience easy to start and complete.  The result is pages full of product descriptions and information on the executive team, but little detail on the types of problems the company’s offerings can solve or answers to common questions potential customers often have.   In other words, these types of websites aren’t very helpful to the consumer and thus don’t do a good job of keeping the customer interested in and engaged with your company, let alone inspire a purchase inquiry.

2. Landing Pages and Calls to Action

Although you may have expected your website to yield practical results, if your new design failed to give visitors anything to do—a call to action, if you will—you aren’t going to get any leads.

If your company is like most others, you likely expect that visitors only come to your site to “buy something” or “set an appointment,” or, in other words, to make a commitment to your business.  The truth is that first time visitors aren’t looking to buy. In fact, most internet users visit a website, no matter the industry, not to make a purchase, but to get answers to their questions.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t get leads from these visitors.

All you need to do is create marketing offers that will be valuable to potential customers.  These offers can be content such as eBooks or Tipsheets, free trials, or anything else that a website visitor who is not yet ready to purchase but is visiting a company’s website for more information may be interested in.

The offers are placed on landing pages that require the visitor to provide some information about themselves before they are able to access the content of the offer. Used in this way, landing pages function as a high-quality lead generation tool.

Calls to Action placed in visible areas around a website promote the offers to website visitors, encouraging them to take action.  

3. Getting Visitors to the Website

Unfortunately for us all, a shiny new website does not automatically equal website traffic. 

There are a few key things that play into how much traffic a website receives, but arguably the most important piece of the puzzle is search engine visibility.  If your potential customers can’t find you when they’re Googling questions or phrases related to your healthcare product or service, you’re missing out on business. 

A website redesign project is an important time to pay attention to this because as your website pages change, you want to make sure that the search engines will still be able to find and index them on the keywords for which you want to rank.  Determining what keywords searchers are using when looking for your product or service type is the first step.  Structuring your website around those keywords is the second. If you’re deleting or renaming URLS for pages, you’ll want your developer to be sure they’re setting up appropriate 301 redirects.  For a more complete website redesign SEO checklist, check out this post by ClickZ.

All is not lost if you’ve made any of these website faux pas. You can still correct these issues and turn your digital marketing ROI around.